By Chris Williams: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says he’ll be making a decision with Manny Pacquiao by next week for his next fight on April 12th in Las Vegas, Nevada. The opponent will be picked from the following fighters: Tim Bradley, Juan Manuel Marquez and Ruslan Provodnikov.
In other words, we’re pretty much looking at another retread opponent for Pacquiao. He’s kind of stuck fighting a small circle of fighters unfortunately, and I think that’s probably how things are going to be for him until he retires.
I’m not sure how many times the boxing public will be interested in seeing Pacquiao fight Bradley, but I guess we’re going to find out in the next couple of years. With Arum’s stable not fully stocked with interesting opposition around the 140-147 weight class, Pacquiao is kind of limited to fight Bradley, Brandon Rios, Mike Alvarado, Ruslan Provodnikov and Marquez for the remainder of his career – or the remaining time that he stays with Top Rank.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Arum matches Pacquiao up with Bradley 4 or 5 times before he retires, if only because he doesn’t have any other interesting names to match him against. I don’t think Bradley is an interesting for Pacquiao. He ran from Pacquiao last year in June to win a controversial decision, and Bradley ran from Marquez recently in beating him. It’s painful to watch Bradley fight.
With Marquez already saying that he has absolutely no interest whatsoever in fighting Pacquiao again, Arum is really picking out Pacquiao’s next opponent from just two fighters – Provodnikov and Bradley. But really I think it’s just one fighter that we’re looking at here, because Provodnikov is probably much too dangerous for Pacquiao, and he’s even less well known than Bradley. So it’s going to be Bradley that ends up fighting Pacquiao on April 12th unless Arum can somehow convince Marquez to agree to a 5th fight against Pacquiao.
“We’re going to decide before Christmas,” Arum said to Hustleboss. We’ll known who he’s going to fight. We’re talking to the pay per view people. Whatever makes the most sense. We’ll make an intelligent decision, and that’s who we’ll fight.”
I don’t see either of those guys – Bradley or Provodnikov – as being appealing opponents for Pacquiao. If his idea is to bring in a ton of PPV buys to try and make up for the disastrous decision to fight Arum’s Top Rank stable fighter Rios in Macao, China of all places, then those aren’t going to be able to make up the lost PPV numbers. Pacquiao should have stood up and said no to Arum when he mentioned Rios as opponent. He also should have said no to fight in Macao. It was a bad idea on both fronts by Pacquiao, as the fight brought in less than 500,000 PPV buys.
I could have predicted that it was going to do terrible numbers. All Pacquaio had asked me, I would have told him that it was a hare-brained idea to fight Rios, and it was definitely dump to fight him in Macao. Now Pacquiao is about to make another mistake in fighting Bradley again. Why would Pacquiao do that when his previous fight didn’t even break 1 million PPV buys? Why go back to a fight that the boxing public wasn’t interested in seeing the first time around? If they didn’t like the fight before, why would they like it now? Pacquiao needs to break out of this in-house fight rut that he’s in and start fighting opposition that the boxing public actually want want to see him fight. Bradley and Provodnikov aren’t big fights, and there’s no way Pacquiao will bring in 1 million PPV buys against these guys. Pacquiao needs to tell Arum ‘No thanks’ to fighting those guys, and insist on Arum finding him some new opposition instead of trotting out pretty much the same old names over and over again.
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